Media coverage of BlackBerry’s end of support for legacy mobile services high on nostalgia, but low on accuracy and precision

Yes­ter­day, Jan­u­ary 4th, 2022, marked the offi­cial end of sup­port for Black­Ber­ry Lim­it­ed’s once ubiq­ui­tous hand­set ecosys­tem for busi­ness­es and indi­vid­u­als, includ­ing Black­Ber­ry 7.1 OS, Black­Ber­ry 10, Black­Ber­ry Enter­prise Ser­vice, Black­Ber­ry World, and Black­Ber­ry host­ed email services.

In the com­ing days, the com­pa­ny will pow­er down and decom­mis­sion the back­end ser­vices that have long sup­port­ed its rec­og­niz­able hand­sets, like the Black­Ber­ry Pearl, Curve, Bold, Play­Book, Q10, Z10, Clas­sic, and Pass­port, leav­ing those devices with degrad­ed and lim­it­ed functionality.

It’s the end of an era, to be sure, and one that man­aged to attract­ed a huge amount of media cov­er­age giv­en how few peo­ple use Black­Ber­rys these days. Near­ly every well known tech press out­let had a sto­ry about the dis­con­tin­u­a­tion, and so did CNN, the BBC, NPR, The New York Times, and The Wash­ing­ton Post.

Near­ly all of the sto­ries I’ve seen about the dis­con­tin­u­a­tion have been high on nos­tal­gia while falling short on report­ing the actu­al details of the shutdown.

Con­sid­er these headlines:

Every lega­cy Black­Ber­ry phone will stop work­ing today
Clas­sic Black­Ber­ry phones will stop work­ing Jan­u­ary 4th
Black­Ber­ry Ends Ser­vice; Devices Will Stop Work­ing Jan­u­ary 4th
Clas­sic Black­Ber­ry devices will stop work­ing on Jan. 4
BlackBerry’s BB10 smart­phones are dead
Black­ber­ry to become non-exis­tent after today
The End of Black­Ber­ry Phones is Final­ly, Tru­ly Here
RIP, Black­ber­ry — Black­ber­ry phones will stop work­ing on Jan­u­ary 4

Today is Jan­u­ary 5th, 2022, and as I type this, all of my Black­Ber­ry devices are still work­ing, despite what the media report­ed yes­ter­day and ear­li­er this week. Oth­er Black­Ber­ry enthu­si­asts are report­ing the same.

That’s because while yes­ter­day was the offi­cial end of sup­port date for the Black­Ber­ry mobile ecosys­tem, it was­n’t the actu­al end of ser­vice availability.

There’s a lot of back­end infra­struc­ture in mul­ti­ple dat­a­cen­ters for Black­Ber­ry to shut off, and as many Black­Ber­ry enthu­si­asts expect­ed, the com­pa­ny appears to be pro­ceed­ing with a phased pow­er-down rather than a big bang demolition.

As of press time, Black­Ber­ry World app down­loads were no longer pos­si­ble, Black­Ber­ry Pro­tect and Black­Ber­ry ID were inac­ces­si­ble, and Black­Ber­ry 10 devices appeared to have been cut off from Black­Ber­ry Mes­sen­ger (BBM).

But call­ing and tex­ting and email­ing remains possible.

I don’t use a Black­Ber­ry as my pri­ma­ry mobile device any­more — I’ve migrat­ed to the iOS and Android duop­oly — but as a long­time Black­Ber­ry user, I’m track­ing the shut­down. I con­vert­ed my Black­Ber­ry hand­sets to what I call “muse­um sta­tus” ear­li­er this week by restor­ing back­ups from var­i­ous time peri­ods to them.

Even after the pow­er-down is ful­ly accom­plished and the rest of the lega­cy infra­struc­ture goes offline, Black­Ber­ry hand­sets may still be oper­a­ble to some degree. Their func­tion­al­i­ty will sim­ply be fur­ther degraded.

Any­one who’s still using a Black­Ber­ry at this point is quite used to los­ing func­tion­al­i­ty on their devices. It’s been hap­pen­ing for years. Many web­sites now throw cer­tifi­cate errors in the Black­Ber­ry brows­er, Face­book, Twit­ter, and LinkedIn inte­gra­tions no longer work, and Black­Ber­ry World, the com­pa­ny’s app store, dis­con­tin­ued app pur­chas­es a few years ago, leav­ing only free apps for download.

Black­Ber­ry Lim­it­ed has advised that its hand­sets should not be used for call­ing or tex­ting after Jan­u­ary 4th, which is prob­a­bly what prompt­ed many media out­lets to char­ac­ter­ize Jan­u­ary 4th as the day that clas­sic Black­Ber­ry devices will stop work­ing. But that was not an accu­rate char­ac­ter­i­za­tion. Jan­u­ary 4th, 2022 was­n’t the day that Black­Ber­ry devices stopped working.

As men­tioned, it is even pos­si­ble, despite Black­Ber­ry’s state­ments, that Black­Ber­ry hand­sets will remain func­tion­al as phones for awhile longer… at least until car­ri­ers turn off their third gen­er­a­tion (3G) wire­less net­works. That’s not guar­an­teed, of course, but then, noth­ing in life is tru­ly guar­an­teed, is it?

Rather than gath­er­ing facts and then report­ing the more com­plex details of this event, a whole bunch of sto­ries appear to have been writ­ten on the basis of a press release and a com­pa­ny end of life doc­u­ment. A sim­plis­tic nar­ra­tive has once again pre­vailed over the more com­pli­cat­ed reality.

This is some­thing I see all of the time, and it con­cerns me. Rig­or­ous jour­nal­ism is sore­ly need­ed in these times to defend democ­ra­cy, stop trust in sci­en­tif­ic research from fur­ther erod­ing, and to sep­a­rate fact from fic­tion. Long-form inves­tiga­tive report­ing — which many out­lets are thank­ful­ly still fund­ing and pro­duc­ing — can­not and should not be the extent of rig­or­ous journalism.

I’ll have more to say about this sub­ject lat­er this week.